Use search engines and Wikipedia to find quality research tools. The emphasis here isn't on *using* Wikipedia directly, but letting it point you in directions of other sources, which makes sense to me. The advice - 'use them to carry you to better places'. Well yes, but that's what we do with search engines anyway in most cases. Search engines don't know the answer to stuff, they just push you to different places or drag content from places to try and answer the query. Interesting reference to Geniusfind which is a search engine directory that categorizes thousands of topic specific search engines and databases. Worth a look. The other reference here was to the Beaucoup engine, which I don't rate highly at all (their geographical section for example is very poor.)

Search blogs for specialists. Yes, makes lots of sense to me. Usual references to Google blog search and Technorati but another suggestion is QuackTrack which lists 6,000+ categories and 150,000+ weblogs.

Study business school websites. Less useful for the non-US readers, but I can see where they're coming from on this - see what research is going on, look to see what's published and follow the links.

Find statistical data on government sources. Makes sense again, though the links given are US government, but everyone else can find their own I'm sure.

Research trade groups and online publications. Good for research in hot topics, and again several references to US associations.

My column in Update is now available online over at CILIP | Internet Q & A - December 2007. I'm answering questions on web browsing for people with visual difficulties, Twitter, LibraryThing alternatives and my site of the month.

November 28, 2007

As you doubtless know, next week is Online Information 2007 which is one of the premier information conferences and exhibitions for librarians and information professionals, but you all knew that anyway. I've been involved with it in one way or another for about the last 20 years, mainly as a delegate, exhibition goer, on a stand or, for most of this century, speaking at the conference, moderating and such like.

Unfortunately, because of Jill's illness I felt that I had to pull out this year - she's just starting chemo and we'll have to see how she is affected by it. Obviously if she's not well I'm going to need to spend time with her, and rather than let everyone down at the last minute, felt that the responsible thing to do would be to pull out earlier and give everyone time to get alternatives up and running. I'm disappointed not to be there, but life is what happens when you're busy making other plans I'm afraid. And besides, I'm sure everyone will be able to cope more than adequately! Best wishes to everyone, and I hope the conference goes well.

For those of you without an interest, move on to another post. :) For those who want to be kept up to date with how Jill is doing, you may want to go along and view her new blog: Riding the Rollercoaster. She's going to be updating it in order to let people know how she is, what she's doing and so on. We thought it made more sense to do it that way than have me popping posts into this weblog now and then.

Briefly however, she's now on a trial at the Royal Marsden - not the one she originally wanted, but a different one, for reasons she explains. If you want to know more - feel free to visit and comment.

Ever in need of a loo (toilet, lavatory, WC, restroom) in a strange city? Then try MizPee.
MizPee finds the closest, cleanest toilets in your area. You can add
and review toilets, get some cool deals in your area and challenge your
knowledge of toilet trivia. (The mind boggles.) The service is currently limited to a dozen US states, so if you're not in those then you're out of luck. You can also access the service via your mobile as well.

I so want to make jokes about this service - honestly I'm not making it up - but if anyone has ever been caught short this really could be useful. (Still not sure about the toilet trivia though!)

Are you looking for something to do? If so, you might want to try Zvents. It's a search engine that looks for events taking place, such as performing arts, music, sport, art and crafts in various locations (I found events in the US, UK and Australia, though nothing in Berlin, so your milage may vary). I approached it with something of a skeptical eye, but it's pretty darn good! I did a search for 'soccer' (football didn't work) in London UK and within 60 miles. It found a variety of matches, dates, kickoff times, locations, AND gave me a map view as well. It's not perfect - it couldn't find me any movies in Basildon Essex for example, but that doesn't entirely surprise me.

The engine also has tabbed searching for movies, venues, restaurants and performers. It quickly found out where Patrick Stewart is acting (Macbeth) with the option of getting tickets, writing a review and giving me a map of nearby restaurants and bars.

November 26, 2007

Nearly nine out of ten connections to the internet in the UK are now made via broadband, according to the latest quarterly survey from the Office for National Statistics (ONS)

In a survey of internet connectivity carried out in September 2007, the ONS found that broadband accounted for 88.4% of all internet connections, up from 86.2% in June 2007. Dial-up connections accounted for just 11.6% of the total.

November 21, 2007

Next up is Ale de Vries, from Elsevier. Publishing 2.0 - just another meaningless buzzword? It changes the way we interact. There are also network effects - the purchase of a phone by someone indirectly benefits the others who are already using phones. Ale takes a focus on behavioral aspects. Blogging - grows immensely, blogging is becoming a record of human history. Elsevier authors are blogging in increasing numbers, as do their customers, particularly librarians. Employees also blog. The company gives their employees freedom to write about work/personal information and make that public. Editors also blog - more than just text, but also multimedia. The Postgenomic project collates blogs; as a result you can see real time citation behaviour. Elsevier use blogs to connect with customers, using a rapid response system. Customers connect with customers. Elsevier encourages this, since the discussions are documented online and the company can use that information to change what they do and how they do it. Blogging is also about connecting people, and this is a company change, since they've always dealt with companies, rather than individuals.

Sharing content - example given was scivee.tv This also means that people need to share the organization of shared content and bookmarks, and Elsevier wanted to get involved and will be launching their own system shortly - 2collab. Elsevier is also looking at dynamic usage information within their Science Direct group.

Wikipedia - successful because it's free, no barriers, lot of it, and it's 'good enough' to use and come back. Wiserwiki is a new Elsevier based product, getting physicians to write articles.

Presentation then moved towards web services and api's. For example, geographic mashups such as the Flickr picture/map resource. Nature magazine has plotted the movement of avian flu in Asia. Disease mashups are another example.

Elsevier is opening up their content to syndication, opening up and exposing the content. Sciencedirect alerts - new issue, keyword appears, citations and so on all available via RSS. Some use via email, but lots use via newsreader, or start pages. They can also provide widgets that people can use to navigate to other content.

All about bringing content and information to users in a different way.

Emma Tonkin is an Interoperability Focus officer at UKOLN, speaking on the subject mentioned in the title of this piece. Many of the audience know and understand the concept of social tagging, so Emma was able to skip past this section. Arguable that it's a distributed classification system, which is created by individuals, typically resource users.

Social tagging does a reasonable job - cheerful anarchy. Easy for the user to write, but computationally difficult to use. On the plus side, the user has engaged with the system. Is social tagging indexing? Probably not, but it is metadata, but you also need to define exactly what that is (Emma says). Social tagging is an emergent structure across many users' contributions. Very useful for making temporary connections until you find the 'real' words.

Very interesting brief discussion on the profiles that people have with things like Facebook. What if you want to change who you are, and what you say about yourself? Perhaps it's easier to just drop Facebook entirely rather than make some dramatic changes.

Users - what information do I care to know, or share about an object, or their reaction to it? Some tags are observations, interpretations, reactions, peformative, so which does the user choose? There is a spectrum of annotations that can be used. Explicit, well defined through to contextual, implicit and informal. Perhaps not a serious problem, since we can search for and find good material on delicious or Flickr for example.

Conclusion - tags are about more than description, it's easy to do, it's not a formal classification, the value depends on expectations, ambitions and the context of use.